Bio

Tony Venables is Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford where he also directs the Centre for the Analysis of Resource Rich Economies.

He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Econometric Society. Former positions include Chief Economist at the UK Department for International Development, professor at the London School of Economics, research manager of the trade research group in the World Bank, and advisor to the UK Treasury.

He has published extensively in the areas of international trade and spatial economics, including work on trade and imperfect competition, economic integration, multinational firms, and economic geography.

Publications include The spatial economy; cities, regions and international trade, with M. Fujita and P. Krugman (MIT press, 1999), and Multinationals in the World Economy with G. Barba Navaretti (Princeton 2004).

Why are African Cities growing in size but not in productivity and how can African Cities escape the low development trap?

In cooperation with the World Bank, our principial investigators, J. Vernon Henderson and Antony J. Venables, worked on a report that highlights how cities can transform from crowded, disconnected and costly cities to livable, productive and affordable cities.

Many cities in developing economies, particularly in Africa, are experiencing ‘urbanisation without industrialisation’. This paper conceptualises this in a framework in which a city can produce non-tradable goods and – if it is sufficiently competitive – also internationally tradable goods, potentially subject to increasing returns to scale.

The paper discusses the importance of infrastructure investment in growing cities, arguing that, in addition to its direct benefits, infrastructure plays crucial roles in enabling density and coordinating private investment decisions. Many cities have failed to invest in sufficient infrastructure due to inadequate financing tools (in particular failure to capture benefits through land value taxation) and fragmented urban authority.

This paper develops and applies a quantitative model of internal city structure to analyse the impacts of transport improvement in Kampala, Uganda. Using a Spatial Computable General Equilibrium Model we develop a simulated version of a city in which firms and households choose their location decisions according to the cost of commuting and transporting goods across the urban space.